"Juneteenth" offers a tantalizing new slice of Ralph Ellison's
____________genius for capturing America's racial conundrums.
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By Colson Whitehead
June 8, 1999 |
When I was younger and starting to write, I had a little grudge against Ralph Ellison. The beef in question was about the long-awaited follow-up to his classic 1952 novel, "Invisible Man." I was looking around for a role model, the kind of writer who could rearrange my brain as Ellison had done back when I first read him. I soon learned that this was an impossible task: No one before or since has described so eloquently and cogently the inextricability of blackness and American-ness, the snake-charming spectacle of identity that dances inevitably before us. When I realized that no one else was going to step up to the plate, I fell into slay-the-father mode and made the odd crack about the man's productivity: "Hey, Ralphy, get the lead out! What are they, payin' you by the hour? I didn't know that Great American Novelist was a union job."
Interviews and articles furnished hints about the novel's progress. Ellison started it in 1954, lost a hefty chunk of it in a fire in 1967, published tantalizing chapters here and there over the years and read parts of it in public until his death in 1994, whereupon any hopes for the second novel seemed to die out. But then the executor of his literary estate discovered 2,000-something pages of the manuscript in the man's office, and you can just picture the disarray, the tottering piles and the daunting task of sorting through it all. What's in there? Any chance he finished it? Then the usual pageant of pundits strolled out for the standard debates, touching all the bases, asking all the legitimate questions about authorial intent, the ethics of posthumous publication, the role of the literary executor. Now "Juneteenth," a 350-page section of the manuscript, is hitting the stores.
John F. Callahan, professor at Lewis and Clark College and Ellison's literary executor, picked out what he thought had the best chance of working as a stand-alone novel: the middle section, "Book II" of a projected three books. He did some jiggling and he did some finagling; he urged a section here and kicked a paragraph there to order scattered sections to stand at attention. And he gave it a title, "Juneteenth," after June 19, 1865, the day Texan slaves were finally brought word of the Emancipation Proclamation. 
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